Yumeji

1991 [JAPANESE]

Action / Drama

7
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 83% · 1 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 83% · 100 ratings
IMDb Rating 6.9/10 10 834 834

taisho taishō period

Plot summary

Following the life of Japanese artist and poet Yumeji Takehisa through the imagining of an encounter with a beautiful widow with a dark past.

Director

Seijun Suzuki Photo
Seijun Suzuki

Top cast

Kenji Sawada Photo
Kenji Sawada as Yumeji Takehisa
Chikako Miyagi Photo
Chikako Miyagi
Michiyo Yasuda Photo
Michiyo Yasuda as Owner of a hotel
Masumi Miyazaki Photo
Masumi Miyazaki as Hikono
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
996.15 MB
1204*720
Japanese 2.0
NR
Subtitles jp  
23.976 fps
2 hr 8 min
Seeds 1
1.87 GB
1792*1072
Japanese 2.0
NR
Subtitles jp  
23.976 fps
2 hr 8 min
Seeds 14

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by HuntinPeck80 8 / 10

Would the real Yumeji please stand up?

Reader, I don't give a sailor's tug if Wong Kar-wai got permission to use Yumeji's Theme from the score of this film; a theme that repeats, ad nauseam, in his overrated opus, In The Mood For Love (2000). I think it's a darned liberty, using music scored for one film, and only nine years older, to boost your own. Did Wong have any original music in his film? I don't know. I feel I now understand why a friend, years back, became so upset when music from Vertigo was reused in the French movie, The Artist. To me, it's like sampling in rap and pop, it's basicallt fashionable theft by less talented people.But anyway...Yumeji (1991), which I only saw because I read about it on Wiki, having already seen In The Mood For Love, is like Wong's film, part of a loose-limbed trilogy. The last part. It's about a real life artist, Yumeji Takehisa (d.1934). It's a peculiar film, but far more entertaining than the overhyped and frankly somnambulant film by Wong. I'd assume the budget for Yumeji was higher, but who knows, and Wong shot a great deal more than he used.One interesting deleted scene, from Wong's film, had the appallingly reticent couple actually dancing together, a sort of twist, an injection of energy, of co-ordinated vivacity, that In The Mood could really have used. Happily, Yumeji, by Seijun Suzuki, has multiple dance numbers, and a hamper full of everything else. It is highly theatrical, moving from place to place within its period (the 1910s?), town and country, dry land and water, things traditional and things modern, such as gramophone records.It starts out in rather a giddy fashion, with Yumeji cavorting with his model, and making love, in the old fashioned sense, to a well brought up lass, who plans to elope with him. Trouble, he is also having dreams of being assassinated by a jealous husband, and of a mysterious lady who will not turn her head. It's not the easiest film to follow. Yumeji comes to an inn, and seeks to make a model out of a lady whose husband has been murdered by a criminal, a local folk hero, still loose in the mountains. Or did the guy really die? Would it be bigamy, adultery, if she and Yumeji? And what about his fine young lass trying to break out and join him, and then there's that other one...If this all sounds like a sex comedy, it sort of is, and often isn't. It's full of visual flourishes, things photographed birds-eye-view, superimpositions, a yellow boat on a bloody lake, erotic drawings that appear as if from Yumeji's brain in a trice. Nudity is kept to a tasteful minimum, scenes of erotic posing are exactly that. And then there are the surreal party sequences.There's something vaguely lynchian about Suzuki's atmospherics, his use of colour and shadow, and the quietly menacing, foreboding dreamscape. But the erotic undercurrent is all his own. The musical scoring reminded me, again vaguely, of Alberto Iglesias's work for Julio Medem. I don't know how it ties in to the other movies, but on its own terms it is fascinatingly weird, so you see why I say its lynchian.Well worth seeking.
Reviewed by figueroafernando 9 / 10

Outstanding landscape of surreal plot

And that is where dramatic poetry flows, from suspense to heartbreak and the warm sweat of crying a hedonist like Yumeji who collapses into the decline of the poetry of the bodies whose banquet had been urgent as impossible, until now, to deprive himself.A caricature of himself, Yumeji saw the multiplicity of his "I" shot up in the foolish personalities that soon displaced him.What sublime scenes in the Wakiya mansion; first, the demon Matsu, prowling him, then his indomitable muse or model, Tomoyo the self-sacrificing wife who, despite her stubborn reluctance to the intruder, ends up giving him not one but both sleeves of the marriage kimono; inside, the secrets: a Mr. Wakiya hunter who gives up and with a code reminiscent of samurai prefers suicide by failing to kill him; a jealous husband more disappeared than truly dead; a refined aesthetic of kitsch-peppered suspense where the Colts of the western and the unusual feminine background exhaust the cameo pursued by the game of gazes along with the mysterious soundtrack, the humiliating slowdown of the painter as precious her indifference, ah! And the expectant crow.Narrative at times elevated and surreal as in a David Lynch story, and then the theatrical baroque of a well-crafted farce.Along with Kagero-za AKA Heat shimmer theater, one of my Suzuki favorites.
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